Overview

Jane McGonigal   Creative Dir,   Avant Game

This was a very interesting lecture. Jane McGonigal specializes in both alternate reality gaming and futurism. She was a very dynamic, smart and funny speaker. Unfortunately, I had to leave before it was over in order to catch my plane home. But, here is what I heard before I left.

She believes that there has been a strong movement over the last decade to focus on our quality of life and happiness. She showed numerous measurements from magazines, TV and newspapers focusing on "happiness". Measurements around things like "The 10 Best Places to Live", "How to achieve work/life balance", even a Canadian Measurement of Happiness (those Canadians). With everything being what it is today, she believes that our measure of success is more of a measure of happiness. After much research, she found these 4 beliefs to define happiness:

01 You like what you do

02 You are good at what you do

03 You like the people around you

04 You feel like you are a part of something bigger than yourself 

For her, the ultimate happy engine can be found in gaming. But before you dismiss this, consider the numbers of people who are flocking to gaming. And she's not just talking about 13 year old boys shooting each other in Call of Duty. It's across the entire population with all ages, both sexes, and all cultures. It's a global mass exodus to virtual worlds/games. But why are all of these people immersing themselves in multi-player alternate reality games? Because it makes them happy.

Look at the list again, and you can see how they fit together. She shared this quote from a study, "For many gamers today, in terms of perceived quality of life, virtuality is beating reality." Additionally, she spoke about how the environment is so much friendlier for being creative. Gamers can try to achieve a goal and fail 99 times out of a hundred in order to learn how to accomplish the goal that 1 time. Failing/dying/crashing is not punished. It's encouraged. It is how you learn quickly. And when you suceed, you get immediate feedback/rewards. Gamers will also help each other to learn/accomplish a goal. Better instruction, feedback, and community. All things that we would desire in the real world.

Which brings us to her point. What if we tried to take the learnings from gaming environments and apply them to the real world. She showed examples of this happening. Chore Wars is a site that allows you to be rewarded and competitive by accomplishing your chores. For a parent trying to get this behavior learned by his child, this could be a great way to make it happen. She also shared an experiment in an office workplace that set up virtual payments for employees accomplishing tasks. Go to a meeting - 25 points. Read an important memo - 10 points. Publish a report - 50 points. Sounds funny, but they were able to track patterns and people in the company. They could see who seemed to be the most needed, productive, and collaborative. People also started to use the economy to their benefit, "I won't attend a meeting for less than 35 credits." While she wasn't promoting this as an office solution, she was very interested in how it changed the dynamics of the office workflow and the learning gained by the experiment. 

She also looked harder at skills that people need to succeed in life, both at work and personally. She created a list of skills like, collaboration, ability to inspire others, communication, talent sourcing, etc. If these were achievements needed to be gained or skills that one could be identified by, imagine how one could uses gaming to improve or gain these needed skills. Especially in an environment where failing is encouraged for rapid learning. The top award winner from SXSWi'08 was a game whose aim was to teach the world what life would be like without oil. It's pretty obvious why this is important in today's landscape. The rapid learning through this game not only provided a safe place to see the world fail without oil, but also allowed participants to see how they can live happily without a dependence on it. And it did change many people's lives. Pretty powerful.

Unfortunately, I had to pack it up and head to the airport. I wish I could have heard the remainder of her lecture. I found her talk to be enlightening. "The best way to change the future is to play with it first."

Well, it's SXSW time in Austin again. The city is buzzing with activity and excitment over all of the people who are here and what new ideas may be learned. And then there is all of the music and film festival goers easily identified with their camera equipment and guitar cases. The interactive ones are wearing backpacks with their laptops in them. It's an exciting start of the day with beautiful weather, eventhough it's colder than usual here for March.

Last night was the opening party at a club called Six. It hit capacity within 15 minutes and the line snaked around the corner and down the block. I opted for a different plan after I recognized that wasn't going to happen. Oddly, I ran into Phil Torrone on the corner. Phil is a friend of mine, a former colleague at Fallon, and the Senior Editor of MAKE Magazine. He was also a keynote speaker at last year's event where he spoke about making amazing things with software and hardware from a hacker, or craftsman, point-of-view. People used to fix their household products when they broke, and you could with a wrench and a soldering iron. His magazine promotes a more hands-on approach to computing today. He also demonstrated a device that blocks out all wireless and mobile connections, basically shutting down the room full of computers and phones for 15 minutes. Could this be fun at a Starbucks? Yes. Is it illegal? Yes. But it was quite the show stopper.

This year will hopefully be equally exciting. I am participating in a panel discussion about the future of web agencies that Microsoft is sponsoring. I'm looking forward to a good discussion. Garrick Schmitt from Razorfish is on the panel, and he was also on the panel with Paul Dain at MIX. 

I hope to be a disciplined blogger updating the site with each panel discussion I attend. Thomas Tafuto, ECD from Dallas, will also be joining me in sharing our learnings. We will try to make it worth the read. Off to breakfast.